The present invention relates to the field of the communication network and more particularly to the management of virtual private networks (VPN).
A virtual private network (VPN) refers to a network using existing communication infrastructures of a transport network, to provide a secured connection between remote entities by establishing a tunnel over the existing communication infrastructures to connect the entities and transfer encrypted data. FIG. 1 represents the establishment of a virtual private network between a first entity 1 and a second entity 3 of a transport network. Both entities are located in remote locations. The first entity comprises a VPN interface 5 and the second entity comprises a VPN interface 7. Thus, if the first entity 1 wants to establish a connection with the second entity 3 and therefore transfers data packets between the Internet protocol (IP) addresses of both entities, a VPN 9 corresponding to a secured tunnel is then established between the first 5 and the second 7 VPN interfaces in order to encapsulate the transmitted data packets of the IP stream 11. The encrypted data packets of the VPN 9 are then transmitted by the transport network 13 between both VPN interfaces 5 and 7.
Besides, with some communication standards, such as long term evolution (LTE), a quality of service (QoS) can be requested when a connection is established in order to have enough resources reserved to ensure the desired QoS for the connection. Thus, different, types of bearers associated with different QoS are defined and a bearer of a selected type is established according to the required QoS.
However, in the state of the art, a virtual private network ensures only a secured transmission between a source and a destination but does not provide features of the transmission such as the used bearer to the transport network entities located at both ends of the VPN. As a consequence, there is no possibility, for the transport network entities to differentiate different bearers and therefore to use differentiated QoS while using a virtual private network of the state of the art.